Blog

Ideas for India and Live Mint are publishing a series on sanitation and r.i.c.e. work. You can see Diane's piece on the conclusions from the SQUAT and qualitative "switching" study about why so many people in India defecate in...Read More..

The Prime Minister yesterday gave his Independence Day speech at the Red Fort, and brought up sanitation as an important issue for the next 4 years! He says, I, therefore, have to launch a "Clean India" campaign from 2nd October...Read More..

The government of India over the years has focused on latrine construction and its spending on behavioral change in the form of Information and Educations Campaigns (IEC) has been minuscule. Infact, the IEC spending between financial year 2013-14 were just...Read More..

We often think that education in general, and educating people on how bacteria spread, will get people to use their latrines. In the graph above, we are able to see latrine use by sex and level of education for people...Read More..

Bloomberg News came out with a story yesterday on how government latrines are often not used in rural north India because people are often disgusted by them. The journalist quotes Yamini Aiyar, of Accountability Initiative, saying: Targets for construction of...Read More..

From the SQUAT Survey, we found that many people prefer open defecation to latrine use, and that latrines are often seen as dirty and unpleasant. Through our conversations with people in rural India, it seems that part of this distaste...Read More..

The SQUAT Survey teams randomly selected and interviewed around 3,200 rural households in over 300 villages in Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Figure 1 We asked people if their religious leaders have ever told them where they...Read More..

To continue the trajectory of chart month, I’d like to share some of the data that we collected in the SQUAT Survey on latrine ownership and usage among different religious groups. The SQUAT Survey teams randomly selected and interviewed...Read More..

I recently picked up V.S. Naipaul’s book An Area of Darkness, a chronicle of his first trip to India published in 1964. Although some view the book as overly pessimistic and scathing, his portrayal of India’s culture of open defecation...Read More..

Just 12 days after the order to states to construct over 5 million toilets by the end of August, the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation issued another order, addressing the need to “sensitize the rural population on sanitation,” by...Read More..

Today at 3pm, in a presentation called "Culture and the health transition: the case of sanitation in rural north India" Diane will be presenting findings from the Switching Study, a qualitative companion study to the SQUAT survey, at the IGC-ISI...Read More..

I'm just writing to flag a useful recent blog post by Eddy Perez of WSP: How and Why Countries are Changing to Reach Universal Access in Rural Sanitation by 2030. Eddy's main examples are from other countries, but I think...Read More..

The world must build more toilets to save lives. Today's #Dailychart looks at open defecation http://t.co/p11zMWJAoxpic.twitter.com/YUYqj5xDXK — The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 17, 2014 Aashish (@pakaupolicy) did some maps for rice. They were used by the economist for its daily...Read More..

The Economist wrote a rather brilliant article on sanitation in India, quoting a whole lot of rice research and the squat survey. It also used our map, but made it much nicer (see below). We thank them for writing this...Read More..

In light of the recent New York Times article highlighting r.i.c.e.’s research on the importance of sanitation for health, quite a few people have asked me how this can be considered an emerging issue. While it may seem obvious to...Read More..